Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

How the hell did I end up here? he wondered.

He glanced at the envelope on the edge of the desk, holding three thousand dollars he couldn’t really afford. Melting ice clinked in his glass and he took a sip of the sour-tasting small batch bourbon that was supposed to be so smooth and looked out over the city. Twinkling lights and the occasional monorail-like movement of a car along St. Clair were the only indications of life out there.

The musical ringing of his cell phone startled him and made him angry all at once. It was going to rouse Lori, and she was going to leave. He crossed quickly to his desk to answer, and his anger grew when he saw the name of the incoming caller: Lowell Gantcher. He would have loved to have let the call go to voice mail, but that would be four more rings, four more times through the brassy samba figure that was his ringtone, and Lori would certainly be gone by then. He snatched the phone off the desk.

“What is it?” he said by way of greeting.

“I want to talk to him,” Lowell Gantcher said on the other end of the phone. The connection was so clean it was as if he were in the room.

“No,” Shugie Saunders said.

“What do you mean, no?” Gantcher asked.

Shugie let silence reinforce his answer, and heard the regretful sound of rustling in the bed behind him. He glanced back and caught a profile view of Lori’s rounded breast, the curve of her back, as she reached for a piece of clothing in the near darkness.

“Come on, Shugie, don’t gate-keeper me. You’re standing in between Bernie and me, and I’m reduced to leaving messages like some kind of jerk off.”

“Then stop leaving messages.”

“I just want to talk to him.”

“Not now.” It was a conversation they’d had a dozen variations of over the past few months, as things had tightened to the strangle point on the business front and as the political picture grew more clear for Kolodnik. Lowell Gantcher was an important builder who held some sway in certain business matters around the city, but for him to call Shugie, insisting on a conversation with Kolodnik now, revealed thinking that verged on the delusional.

“He’s my partner, for god’s sake,” Gantcher insisted.

“Was,” Shugie corrected. “He doesn’t touch that investment anymore.” Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, a few fingernail tips dancing like ballerinas along his clavicle. Shugie turned to see Lori standing there, dressed, her sandy blond hair bed-ruffled, and her eye makeup gone slightly raccoon. He loved seeing her this way. She looked five years younger than her already youthful twenty-three, and it also meant that they’d been together, that he’d had her. He raised a single, feeble finger for her to wait one minute.

“He’s in public service now. He considers you a friend, but that’s all. He’s got to weigh the public good and many other interests against those of the gaming industry. Perhaps you can talk to the trustee overseeing the blind trust-”

“Fuck you, Shugie,” Gantcher said.

“I’m going,” Lori mouthed to him.

Disappointment and fury met in Shugie’s chest and he vented it on Gantcher. “This conversation is over,” he said icily and hung up.

Lori already had the envelope in her hand as he tossed the phone down on the desk. Her hand crushed the paper softly, and she let him wrap her in an embrace that had a similar effect. He breathed in the scent of her hair-a synthetic fruit smell-that delighted him to his core. She stepped back.

“When am I going to see you again?” he asked.

“Just call me.” She smiled. Of course.

“Better question: when are we going to take this to the next level?” he said, as lightly as he could.

“Same old question.” She sighed. “You know the deal, Shugie: overnight is no problem if you tell me in advance and you’re willing to spend the eight. And you can book a weekend.”

“Sure, just go on the Web site, and you’ll need your own room. Right?”

“Just for a few hours a day. It’ll still be a great time. And you don’t have to go on the site, you can text me,” she corrected.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he said, hating how it sounded.

“I know,” she answered, and he swore he recognized real feeling under her words. He embraced her again, nuzzled her neck, and then she was gone as if he’d been holding a ghost.

He knew exactly how he’d ended up here.

11

C’mon, Frank, Behr urged himself, get up.

When he had woken, he hadn’t felt much like working out, but the idea of skipping two days in a row didn’t sit well with him either. He pictured the two turning into a hundred and saw himself fat and logy and permanently planted in a rocking chair or, worse, a desk chair. So he’d put on T-shirt and shorts, drank some water, and got his ass out there. Now he had a kettlebell, a cold black chunk of iron that resembled a cannonball with a handle and weighed fifty-six pounds, in his right hand and was in the middle of a set of Turkish get-ups. The exercise consisted of lying on his back, arm locked out straight overhead, and then climbing to his feet, arm still straight up, and dropping into a lunge before rolling onto his back again. And then, of course, it was rinse and repeat for twelve reps each arm. It was full-body torture that involved pushing the muscular, ligamentous, lactic acid, and cardiovascular systems to their limits. Arms, legs, core, and wind-there was nowhere to hide and there was just no way to do them fast enough so that he wasn’t doubled over and panting by the end. The bottle of expensive grape juice he’d drunk that was now rolling around in his gut didn’t help much either.

Behr tried to distance his mind from the exertion, to take the focus off the pain of what he was doing, and to think about what he always did these days: the moment in less than four weeks when his soon-to-arrive son would be born. He and Suze had found out it was going to be a boy a few months back at an ultrasound.

“There it is,” the technician said. “You want to know?”

“No, we just want you to know,” Behr had answered.

“Yes, tell us please.” Susan laughed. She was generally amused at the semirude utterances he inadvertently dropped. But that didn’t stop her from spreading some diplomacy around.

So, his second son was on the way. The one he’d be able to hold, to feed, to take places, teach, and to support. To support. It stopped him. It was the question that weighed heavy on him now, and it always would. He remembered that much from the first time around. It was what pushed him to go ahead and give up his own business and take the Caro job. A fallow period is one thing when you’re the only one eating spaghetti at home three weeks in a row, Behr thought. But with mommy and baby, that kind of struggle just wasn’t acceptable. And he couldn’t forget the fact that in three and a half years’ time he was looking at preschool and private school bills, which was going to be required barring a miraculous turnaround by the city’s abysmal public system. At times like this the steady paycheck was mighty welcome. Which was why it was of no use to him for his thoughts to keep drifting back to the night in the parking garage. The sledgehammer pounding of the rounds hitting cars had a physical quality as he remembered it. The air around him had been so disturbed it was like being in the wake of scores of tiny fighter jets buzzing by.

Behr stood between sets, and paced around the small patch of grass, getting his wind back. The attempt was made on Kolodnik the night before he was announced as the governor’s choice for the vacant Senate seat. Political assassinations didn’t happen in America more than about twice a century, and more often than not they concerned a psychopath working out some inner drama on a public stage. They sure as hell didn’t happen in Indianapolis, aka Nap Town, the city that never wakes. But the cops would have to be blind not to see it as such. As an investigator, Behr needed to not leap at the obvious, and as a Caro investigator he needed to not worry about it at all and instead focus on his cases, which meant the Payroll Place robberies.

Then there was the wine. He hadn’t been very communicative with Susan the night before about receiving the gift-if that’s what it was. The reason for that was it had made him uncomfortable. A